Guest Post: Our Favorite Villains - Katharine & Elizabeth Corr

Can true love's kiss break your heart...? 

The spellbinding sequel to THE WITCH'S KISS by authors and sisters, Katharine and Elizabeth Corr. It's not easy being a teenage witch. Just ask Merry. She's drowning in textbooks and rules set by the coven; drowning in heartbreak after the loss of Jack. But Merry's not the only one whose fairy tale is over. Big brother Leo is falling apart and everything Merry does seems to push him further to the brink. And everything that happens to Leo makes her ache for revenge. So when strangers offering friendship show them a different path they'd be mad not to take it... Some rules were made to be broken, right? 

The darkly magical sequel to THE WITCH'S KISS burns wickedly bright.

Welcome to the last stop on the blog tour to celebrate the publication of The Witch's Tears by Katharine & Elizabeth Corr. The Witch's Tears is the amazing sequel to last year's The Witch's Kiss and you can find my somewhat overdue review here.

Our Favourite Villains

Elizabeth & Katharine Corr

From the Wicked Witch of the West to Lord Voldemort, there are so many delectable villains to frighten us all at bedtime. Here are our five favourites, plus an honourable mention…

Dolores Umbridge – Harry Potter & the Order of the Phoenix (plus subsequent books), JK Rowling

‘Deep down, you know that you deserve to be punished. Don’t you, Mr Potter?’

A bureaucrat and sometime teacher who hates children, sends innocent people to Azkaban and uses words like ‘half-breed’. Oh, and she has a magic blood-sucking quill that leaves physical scars on her victims. Horror cloaked in pink twinsets and fluffy kittens. We think she’s even worse than Lord Voldemort’s more obvious brand of evil if that’s possible.

Count Dracula – Dracula, Bram Stoker

‘It seemed as if the whole awful creature were simply gorged with blood; he lay like a filthy leech, exhausted in his repletion.’

The original and scariest of vampire villains – Stephanie Meyer’s Volturi have nothing on him. Dracula doesn’t sparkle. What he does do is lock people in his castle as a ‘snack’ for later, drain the blood of his male victims, and turn the female ones into ravenous, teeth-gnashing ‘brides’. The stuff of nightmares.

Jadis, Queen of Charn – The Magician’s Nephew, C S Lewis

‘“Don’t you understand?” said the Queen (still speaking to Digory). “I was the Queen. They were all my people. What else were they there for but to do my will?”’

Most familiar as the White Witch in The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe, Jadis is first introduced as the last survivor of the destruction of Charn – destruction which she’d caused. After getting into a fight with her sister, Jadis decides that she’d rather speak the Deplorable Word and wipe out every living thing in the world than lose. Or, you know, compromise. Obviously, all sisters fall out occasionally, but this seems like taking things to extremes. Jadis follows this up by taking over Narnia and plunging it into everlasting winter.

Sebastian – The Mortal Instruments, Cassandra Clare

‘His grin was diabolical. Gone was the stylish boy who’d strolled by the Seine with her and drank hot chocolate and talked about belonging. His eyes were all black, no pupil, like tunnels. “What’s wrong, little sis? You look upset.”’

King of creepy. Sebastian plans to take over / destroy the world by creating an army of zombie-like Dark Shadowhunters. He also wants to restore the strength of Lilith, a greater demon who considers herself his mother. Worst of all, he wants to do all of this with his sister Clary ruling by his side – and he is way too fond of kissing her. Sebastian quotes from the Song of Solomon and takes sibling-marrying Egyptian pharoahs as his role models. Enough said, probably. We were both pretty relieved when Clary finally kills him.

The Other Mother – Coraline, Neil Gaiman

‘“I swear it,” said the other mother. “I swear it on my own mother’s grave.”

“Does she have a grave?” asked Coraline.

“Oh yes,” said the other mother. “I put her in there myself. And when I found her trying to crawl out, I put her back.”’

Someone with buttons instead of eyes would be enough to freak us out even if they were super heroic. The other mother is anything but heroic. She collects children’s souls and wants to kidnap Coraline – and replace her eyes with buttons, too. The other mother creates copies of living things and then discards them. And she’s hard to kill. The thought of her dismembered hand scuttling around the real world is almost more frightening than the whole of her…

Honourable mention: The Child Catcher, from Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang by Ian Fleming

The Child Catcher is not actually in the book: Roald Dahl is credited with creating the character for the 

screenplay. The idea of a child kidnapper is scary enough, but the Child Catcher’s sinister capering and

unfeasibly long nose, plus his trick of trapping his victims by offering them sweets, transform him from scary

to spine-chilling.

Katharine and Elizabeth are sisters living near to each other in Surrey. They’ve both written on and off since childhood. Both read history at university (Cambridge and Warwick) and both worked as professionals in London (accountancy and law). Then they stopped working to raise families, not realising that children are far more demanding than clients or bosses. When they both decided to write novels – fictional people being much easier to deal with than real ones – it was obvious they should do it together. 

When Katharine’s not writing, she likes playing the harp, learning dead languages and embracing her inner nerd. When Elizabeth’s not writing, she likes sketching, dancing around the kitchen and plotting for more time free of children and cats. They can sometimes be found in one of their local coffee shops, arguing over which character to kill off next.

Find Liz on Twitter @lizcorr_writes and Kate @katharinecorr and find out more about them and their books on their website.